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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

OpenLaszlo Newbie

Took a look at the OpenLaszlo video, and was very impressed that you can add drag and drop to web pages, using either Flash or DHTML. I am interested in the second because I want to be able to generate pages that can be run on Firefox from any platform. I could give a...
well, I'll try to keep this post civil, lets just say Internet Explorer is not my favorite browser.

The other thing I like, is it looks like you can get very creative, and only need the ISP to host normal web pages.

First step was to get OpenLaszlo installed. I must admit, I've been struggling a bit with this one.

I am running Ubuntu 6.06. Yes, I know that's about three or four releases behind the times. But I don't want to mess with a working system and take a chance on breaking something.

I did get the files downloaded and safely tucked away in another partition.

The first challenge was getting JAVA_PATH correctly specified. Went searching for the SDK, with find, but with little luck. Did a which java, and it ended pointing to my JRE, not my JDK.

OK, I say to myself, how about adding a panel button for starting Tomcat.

Now a word of explanation. I'm running everything on this laptop. For development work, I run as a normal user with a user id dedicated for that purpose. I don't want root privilege for this, and worse case scenario, I can save my data and blow away the user if anything un-nice happens. Likewise, I don't want to start Tomcat as part of the normal system services. Yes, I know it would be fun, but it is also a potential vector for bad things, and I want to limit it to when I really need it.

However the long and the short of it is, I can create a bash shell script to set the environment variable and start Tomcat, and that works fine. Tomcat remains running even after I shut down the terminal window.

However if I launch the script as a button from a panel, it doesn't work.

# Don't pay any attention to the partition name. At one point I was thinking of installing different versions of Linux, but this Ubuntu does everything I need. The kubuntu is just a leftover partition name.

# This final read will force the terminal window to remain open until there is an input.

read cont < /dev/tty

# End of Script.

So what this means is that as long as the window remains open, Tomcat will continue to run.

The question I have is why is it that when this terminal window closes, my Tomcat stops, but when I launch a normal terminal window and run the script, Tomcat continues to run until I run the shutdown.sh, even if I close the terminal window I used to start Tomcat?

Yeah, I've a bad habit with run on sentences.

By the way, the shutdown.sh works just fine from the panel button, as I would expect. It's just the start that has got me puzzled.

If I ever figure out what I need to do to keep it running from the panel, I'll post the answer.

Which means a whole bunch of OpenLaszlo needs to be installed on the server which services the web pages, as opposed to the SOLO application. When I attempted to select SOLO, even though I specified .dhtml, the resultant web page still contained only .swf files.

Another minor detail, it generates pages for flash seven and flash 8, but I know there were some serious problems with flash that were fixed with flash 10, and I don't know what will happen if you try to run the resultant .swf with flash 10. I know I should install flash 10 before I start commenting, but the point of this exercise is to learn about OpenLaszlo, and if installing Flash 10 breaks something, I'm up a creek.

Taking a look at some of the javascript files, I have to admit that I am impressed with the work the OpenLaszlo team has done. There is really a lot of stuff there.

Open Laszlo, while it did what I wanted, I ran into a problem when they did an update, forget the versions, I switched from and two, but was running into a problem.

Well, I did get an updated copy installed on Fedora 10, but the machine had a tendency to shut down. Suspect it was a bios issue with a machine designed for home entertainment, and not as a server. So it would decide to shutdown on it's own if it wasn't being used. Not something a server should do. Picked up a netbook and installed Ubuntu 9.04, and got Open Laszlo installed, and working, then installed it on a different machine running XP.

One thing that you need to be aware of is the Tomcat that is delivered with Open Laszlo, is an older version. You have trouble the current Vanilla Tomcat, and the Tomcat for Open Laszlo, because the value of the environment variable CATALINA_HOME needs to be changed depending on the version you use. This needs to be done from Control Panel, system environment variables. Unquestionably inconvenient for XP. No problem on Linux.